Tag: NZ

The BA’s reputation has been progressively eroded – no-one seems to know exactly how or why. It became seen as the degree for people who didn’t know what they wanted to do. The degree for layabouts seeking fewer teaching hours. The degree for lightweights without the smarts to do anything else.

And then came the jokes: “What did the arts graduate say to the science graduate? ‘Would you like fries with that?’

In a world of high university fees and high youth unemployment, the acid of negativity seems to be finally etching its mark.

In the face of falling enrolments, Otago University plans to cut about 16 staff in five arts departments. Victoria University is restructuring its language departments, with job losses, after student numbers fell up to 30 per cent in five years. Auckland University arts enrolments have dived 9 per cent since 2010. Nationwide, arts deans are desperately talking up their degrees and reshaping their structure to make graduates more employable.

…

It’s one of the first questions prospective BA students ask Liz Medford: Is it going to get me a job?

The Victoria University careers manager has been dishing out advice for 29 years. She’s surveyed 300-odd employers since 1996 and their demands have barely changed – verbal and written communication, analysis, problem-solving, teamwork.

“The skills of a BA are just as useful today as they’ve ever been.”

What has changed is higher fees and parents and students opting for the security of a degree that appears more marketable. But there has to be time for exploration, she says.

As I’ve previously written, vocational or professional degrees are about how to do things—how to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a businessperson—whereas an arts degree is about what you should do. The BA is about having time and space to explore intellectually so that you can then make a properly informed decision about the vocation you wish to commit to—which can then be studied at the postgraduate level. It’s an expensive use of time, to be sure—but it has always seemed to me far more expensive to wake up one day towards the end of a vocational degree, or even later, only to have worked out that that’s not what you want to do for the rest of your life.

That’s why I’m such a proponent of the US higher education system, because the BA and BSc are structurally built in as the only option for an undergraduate degree. It’s a real shame that articles like this one—in addition to propagating nasty generalisations and stereotypes—fail to point out alternative systems, taking ours as universal.

The National Party of New Zealand presents on its website a “plan” for the country’s future. “We have a clear plan to make New Zealand a stronger, more prosperous country and it’s a plan that’s working”, they say.

The Labour Party, by contrast, presents on their homepage a “vision” for the country: “New Zealanders don’t ask a lot, but there are some things that make us who we are and define our place in the world. We call it the Kiwi dream.”

These approaches, at least in the political realm, are often mutually exclusive. The Nats makes no mention of a vision for where their plan will take them, and Labour does not describe a plan for achieving their vision.

In politics that might simply be a function of where each party expects to gain support. For the governing party, a plan is really all that matters; they’ve been elected on a vision, and now all people are about is whether they have a plan to govern effectively. Results are now what count. By contrast, the opposition requires a sweeping vision for an alternative future for those who believe the incumbent’s plan is not working. They need not worry about a plan until elected, when the narratives might be expected to switch between the parties.

In the non-zero-sum worlds that are our lives, a vision is only worth describing if backed by a plan; and a plan is only relevant if one has a vision for where that plan might take them. Visions and plans are not mutually exclusive, but too often—whether in a hangover of the political world, where we encounter them most often, or in some failure of nature—people seem still to swing one way or the other. Too often it is vision without a plan or a plan without a vision.

This can explain the failure of many startups. Some have brilliant execution, but no one cares because they don’t inspire. Others have a grand vision to mobilise people, but then can’t back that up with a plan to achieve anything.

And it can explain the failure of many people to achieve aims and goals they’ve set for themselves, even those that deal with lives as a whole. We often oscillate between the extremes of visions and plans without finding the middle ground where they meet, which is the only place that truly matters.

Political narratives can box our minds in, encouraging us subconsciously to mimic in our lives the approaches taken on the campaign trail. But when it comes to visions and plans, the difference between the zero-sum world of politics and the positive nature of our lives means we need to be aware of those narratives and take pains to grasp at both sides of the picture.

There’s only point having a vision if backed by a plan, and a plan is only worthwhile if it serves some vision. Perhaps, ultimately, what politics really needs is a party willing to risk putting the two together—at the same time.

About

Welcome. This is the personal website of Michael Moore-Jones. I'm a New Zealander and a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Yale-NUS College. I've previously studied at Yale University and ten other academic institutions in six countries.